[hernandito]

Hi Guys,

First, I am not sure if Drive Pooling is the right term... What I am hoping to do is to have a few hard drives in my XBMCbuntu box and somehow have the system see all those drives as a single storage device.

This way when I configure my library, my Couch Potato and Sick Beard, the stuff all automatically gets stored without having to change configurations around as the drives fill up.

If this possible? I know it is with separate systems like unRAID and the like. I do not need redundancy or parity...

Thanks,

H.

[jschoen]

I think you are looking for LVM (Logical Volume Manager, I think). I originally did this and then I got rid of it. It was agood bit of work to set it up, and I found it just as easy to mount new drives and point things to it. But if you want to give it a go, take a look at this question I asked on askubuntu.com a while back.

[hernandito]

Wow that was quick.... thank you! It does not look that scary...

Thanks you very much!

[jervine]

LVM is an excellent method of managing physical disk devices and providing volumes to the Linux kernel. You might also want to consider looking at software RAID on Linux (searching for mdadm should point the way). Software RAID also allows you to aggregate multiple devices. These can complementary solutions - you can build an LVM environment on top of a software RAID configuration. Software RAID would allow you to have a degree of device redundancy, which might be of interest.

[FishOil]

Forget LVM

MHDDFS is what you want.

any drives any format.

http://romanrm.ru/en/mhddfs

[hernandito]

Thanks FishOil... that looks great... Do you know if this mount is done permanent, or after rebooting it will gone?

[FishOil]

Thanks FishOil... that looks great... Do you know if this mount is done permanent, or after rebooting it will gone?

Put it in fstab and it will be there every boot.

Here is what I use in fstab

Code:

mhddfs#/media/Disk1,/media/Disk2,/media/Disk3,/media/Disk4 /media/POOL fuse defaults,allow_other,mlimit=5g 0 0

Each disk mount point separated by commas and a space for the pool. The mlimit is the amount that mhddfs will considor the disk full and move to the next disk.
Make this mlimit the size of the biggest file you might have.

[hernandito]

Sounds perfect thank you... I will give this a test.

[vzjrz]

I also gave mhddfs a try but I was getting really slow write and read speeds. It was probably my old computer's fault. I then found Greyhole and I've been using it for about 6 months now without any problems to my data.

[hernandito]

Thank you guys.... I am now in a bit of a conundrum. I was using XBMCbuntu and was having frequent crashes as seen on the thread here.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=119855

I was getting so many freezes that it made the system (2 PCs) unusable for my wife and 7 y.o. son. It looks like the only solution so far is to go to OpenELEC. Which I tested on a spare drive.

Getting any of the solutions here is not going to be doable in OpenELEC...

[rogers13]

Hi Guys,

First, I am not sure if Drive Pooling is the right term... What I am hoping to do is to have a few hard drives in my XBMCbuntu box and somehow have the system see all those drives as a single storage device.

I believe what you are describing is known as RAID concatenation or JBOD (just a bunch of disks)

[eluSive_NZ]

Thank you guys.... I am now in a bit of a conundrum. I was using XBMCbuntu and was having frequent crashes as seen on the thread here.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=119855

I had similar issues, upgrading my nvidia drivers to 295.40 solved all issues for me.